Why are they Nerfing the B.R.U.T.E ?

The B.R.U.T.E is a mech that was introduced a few patches ago and was insanely overpowered. This was shown when Harrison Chang AKA “Psalm” who came second place in the Fortnite Solos World Cup used the B.R.U.T.E devastate the field. He got to a high vantage point then proceeded to take out players from across the map.

What are the nerfs to B.R.U.T.E?

Decreased the maximum amount of rockets fired by the B.R.U.T.E. in a single charge from 10 to 6.

Decreased the rate at which the rockets are fired from the B.R.U.T.E. by 56%.

Our goal with these changes is to increase the back and forth between the users of the B.R.U.T.E. and the players they face. These changes allow the players on the receiving end of the missile volley to have more time to react and protect themselves.

Decreased the radius of the B.R.U.T.E.’s rocket explosion by 42%.

Our goal with this change is to improve consistency and understanding around focused barrages of missiles. B.R.U.T.E.s will continue to be a strong option against structures, but less lethal against players.

Increased the dash cooldown from 3 seconds to 5 seconds.

The previous dash cooldown not only increased the B.R.U.T.E.’s mobility, but also made the B.R.U.T.E.s a harder target to hit from distance than we’d like. The adjustment here reduces the ability to close gaps quickly while in the B.R.U.T.E. while also increasing the ability to land shots on target for players facing the B.R.U.T.E.

Decreased the velocity gained from boosting while in air by 33%.

We want to reduce a B.R.U.T.E.’s ability to engage and disengage at long distances to encourage a more strategic approach to an encounter. In general we hope to shift B.R.U.T.E.s away from being highly mobile and put more emphasis on their already defensive nature.

The B.R.U.T.E. no longer grants materials to the driver and passenger when stomping or dashing through the environment.

Note: This change should roll out shortly following the other changes.

Our goal is to add more tension between being in and out of a B.R.U.T.E. as well as reduce instances where players can farm faster than intended without exposing themselves to danger.

Previously, the early stages of a match were guaranteed a minimum amount of B.R.U.T.E.s. We’d like to provide a little more variance to that experience so that matches don’t always play out the same way. The overall average number of B.R.U.T.E.s per game is reduced slightly.

Decreased the material cost of using the gunner’s overshield from 200 to 75.

Our goal is to further emphasize use of materials for positive defensive benefit.

Junk rift temporarily removed

Increased the Health of the B.R.U.T.E from 1000 to 1250.

With the above changes, users of the B.R.U.T.E. need to play a bit more strategic than before, so we want to give a little bit longer of a window to do so.

Other changes

Epic games had temporarily disabled the Junk Rift for the FNCS tournament and Arena playlists until the 10.20 update. the reason they are doing this is because of an Audio bug that occured when the portal was high above the player.

“Is Fortnite Down?” is a question we have all asked ourselves at some point in our time playing Fortnite Battle Royale. What do you do when your connection to the servers seems to be down or laggy? A good place to start is to check if there isn’t a problem with your local network. Check your wireless or wired connection to your router. If you can get ot other sites but Fortnite is not working the the two most obvious answers to these problem are:

The internet connection to the game servers is down.

The servers themselves are down.

How to check you internet connection?

pings to fortnite

There are a few things you can do to check if your internet connection is down or if your connection to the epic games servers is having issues.

Check your fortnite ping . This site will show you the pings to all available fortnite servers. If you know which server region is your closest and this site is saying that your ping to that server is bad. Then there is obviously problems with your connection to that region.

If the ping seems ok then checking if the actual Fortnite servers are down is the next step. The site you are currently on is well known for checking server status. It does this by looking for social chatter about fortnite. It checks the official Fortnite twitter account amongst many others to try and get a sense of if there is something wrong with the servers.Are Epic servers downFortniteserverstatus.com site also collates reports locally. So if you are having issues with Fortnite make sure

you hit that report button.

Where else can you check?

FortniteBR subreddit is a great place to see if there is any chatter about the game having problems.

Epic used to have a great forum that kept players up to date on what was happening with Fortnite but recently they shut it down. We here at Fortnite Server Status think that was a mistake. It was a pretty vibrant little community and was a little more informative than reddit.com.

So what is new in V10.10 Content Update?

Dusty Depot is back but don’t get your hopes up it is only back as a prefab in creative mode. The full list of Prefabs and galleries is:

5 New Prefabs

Dusty Depot Blue Warehouse

Dusty Depot Gray Warehouse

Dusty Depot Red Warehouse

Dusty Depot Visitor Warehouse

Dusty Diner

2 New Galleries

Dusty Depot & Diner Gallery

Dusty Depot & Diner Prop Gallery

What is new in Fortnite Save the World?

There is a new rocket launcher. The V6 Rocket launcher which is a 6 shot rocket launcher and part of the Rat Rod Weapon set. It does not consume ammo but has very low durability.

A new quest has appeared so make sure you run Hit the Road to activate your weekly quest!

There have been some bug fixes:

Mission details now correctly update when switching between different Missions with a controller.

Resolved an issue where objective information was not displayed for the current Mission.

Added some information that was missing from the Command and Armory tabs.

Fixed an issue where the map was not loading properly after changing tabs.

Game no longer crashes when launching a Mission through the “Play Now” button in the quest log.

The Record Dash quest no longer states to find five records instead of four when in a full party.

What has changed in Fortnite Battle Royale mode?

This is what most people are here for. The additions to the BR mode are as follows:

1) There is a new throwable item called the Junk Rift. It creates a rift in the sky that objects fall out of the sky and destroys things they land on. When thrown it breaks on contact with something (hopefully another player). It generates two types of damage.

Direct Damage – It does 200 damage to players and knocks them back a little.

Shockwave Damage – This causes a small damage radius that does 100 damage and immediately destroys vehicles and destructible objects.

The Junk Rift has Epic Rarity and max stack size of 4. it will be available from Floor Loot, Chests, Supply Drops, and Llamas.

2) Glitched Consumables: appear at the explosion site (explained below) and randomly switch between forageable items. The following items are included:

Shadow stones were supposed to be included as a Glitched Consumable but had a bug and have been removed.

The Rift Beacon at the Rec Center has malfunctioned, which has caused an explosion and crater. This is where the Glitched Consumables spawn.

There has been a change to the Green Toy Wrap which means players can get a refund on the Toy Soldiers Wraps bundle if they do not like the changes. Players have 30 days from their next login to get this refund.

What is a Battle Royale Game?

Battle Royale Movie

The term “Battle Royale” was first popularized by the 2000 movie Battle Royale directed by the late Kinji Fukasaku. The movie was based on the book of the same name by Koushun Takami. The film is based around a group of high school kids that are forced to fight each other to the death on an island that has been split up into a number of “death zones“. All the students are fitted with explosive collars to try and ensure that they fight each other. If a student disobeys this directive the collar is exploded and the student is killed.

In BR games there is a storm or circle of energy or some such entity that slowly forces the players together. This technically doesn’t happen in the movie but does bring us to the next talking point.

What makes a BR Game different from a Standard First or Third Person Shooter?

Come along as we will delve a little into the history of BR games.

Other than BR there are a few styles of First/Third Person Shooter games.

Death match style games like Unreal Tournament. Where the goal is to get as many kills on the other players in the game.

In a standard First Person shooter (FPS) there are usually 2 or more teams fighting each other. A good example of this is CS:GO. CS:GO is published by Valve Entertainment and is one the longest continuously running FPS games on the internet. In this type of shooter game one team will win if either of the following conditions occur:

It kills the whole of the other team.

Completes an objective like planting a bomb or defusing a bomb.

Arma 3 Battle Royale

Both Unreal tournament and CS:GO have long heritages that stretch back into the 90’s. However the history of BR games really only goes back to 2013 and the release of Arma 3. The team that developed ARMA 3 built it to be modifiable by the player base and modify it they did. the two biggest mods that came out of Arma 3 were Dayz which is a huge Zombie survivalist mod and the one we are interested in is “PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale”. PlayerUnknown ( AKA Brendan Greene) is now famous for role in the development of PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds).

Brendan Greene is a huge fan of the Battle Royale movie and decided that it would make a great mod for Arma 3 which he was playing heavily at the time. He admits to not being a great coder but he cobbled together the battle royale mod for Arma 3 and the game was an instant success. he went on to help with the development of H1Z1 which is another standalone third person Battle Royale game. In the mode a

So how did Fortnite become a Battle Royale Game?

Save the World

Fortnite was never conceived as a battle royale game. Originally the only mode was called “Save the World”. In Save the World players have to cooperatively fight zombie-like creatures to achieve various missions across a number of different maps. In this mode “the Storm” from the BR mode actually caused the death of 98% of the world’s population. players gain rewards by completing missions and their characters level up and improve.

Fortnite was never going to be a Battle Royale. It was actually conceived as cross between Left 4 Dead and Minecraft. The unique building element of the game was designed to be somewhat like Minecraft. Suffice is to say the mode is not very popular.

So how did Fortnite morph into a Battle Royale? Epic Games had what was reportedly a consultative role in the development of PUBG. PUBG is built on Epic’s Unreal Engine. PUBG was pushing the limits of what the Engine could do so Epic was consulted heavily in technical elements of the PUBg implementation. It was at about this time that Epic got the idea to add a Battle Royale version of Fortnite. Bluehole the developer of PUBG tried to sue Epic over infringement of intellectual property but that lawsuit was dropped around June 2018.

It has to be said that Fortnite adding a battle Royale element at about the same time as helping out with PUBG can’t be a coincidence. No intellectual property was stolen but you can’t help thinking the seed idea of Fortnite BR mode germinated at about this time. Epic might have got the idea from Bluehole but the Fortnite implementation of battle royale went on to dominate the gaming world.

Why are Battle Royale Games so Popular?

It has to be the gladiator effect. The gladiator effect is that feeling a player gets when they are the last person standing. Knowing that 20, 40 or even 100 people dropped into this game, after all the many battles that have taken you are the last person left alive at the end is one of the best feelings ever in gaming history.

Another phenomenon has arisen at the same time as battle Royale games and that is Streaming. Twitch is the most popular live streaming service and twitch’s growth in traffic has developed a definite spike since the introduction of the battle Royale formulae. Streamers like Ninja, Myth and Timthetatman almost exclusively stream Fortnite battle royale games. Streamers like Shroud stream other battle royale games almost exclusively. These streamers have millions of followers collectively. no other gaming genre comes close to matching these viewer numbers.

We can’t Finish without talking about the Storm

What is the storm in Fortnite? It is a ring around the playing area that reduces in size as the game progresses. It’s main job is to force players together to encourage fights and to finally leave on player standing. In the history of BR games the storm has had many variants. In pubg it is called simply the blue zone, this innocuous blue zone causes varying amounts of damage depending on how far the game has progressed. In H1Z1 it is called the gas. In Apex it is usually only referred to as the circle. Whatever it is called in the battle Royale you are playing there is one thing they all have in common and that is the storm has the most kills. More than even the best player. Beware of the storm.

What is 2FA?

2FA is short for Two-factor Authentication. This means that instead of just using a username and password (Single Factor Authentication) to protect an Epic account, an extra step is added to make the process even more secure. The additional layer makes it much harder for hackers to gain access to a Fortnite account and the sensitive information it contains. We will be showing you how to protect your valuable Vbucks and cosmetic items.

What types of Two Factor Authentication are available?

Epic account 2fa

Knowledge factor : This when the owner of the account has an extra PIN or shared secret.

Possession factor : This when an owner of account has some physical device that can help verify the person accessing an account. This is usually a mobile phone (Text Message or Verification App), Security token or smart ID card.

Biometric factor : This is usually a fingerprint reader, facial recognition software or some rare cases retinal eye scanner.

Location factor : Tracking where the login attempt is being made from. This factor can take into account IP addresses, feo location and GPS coordinates.

Time factor : This factor forces a time window restriction on accessing an account. This is often used by parents to restrict access to mobile devices.

How to Enable Two-factor Authentication in Fortnite

First of all, there is a good chance you will be receiving emails asking you to change the password to your epic games account. These emails will often have links in them and the email will be asking you to click on the link to change the password. DO NOT DO THIS! Even an email is from Epic themselves it is never a good idea to click on a link that is asking you to change your Fortnite password. It is always better to be safe than sorry.

To protect your Fortnite account with 2 Factor Authentication do the folowing:

Go to Epicgames.com.

log into your Fortnite account.

Open account settings at the top right of the screen.

Select password and security.

Scroll all the way to the bottom and select enable Authentication App or enable Email Authentication.

Fortnite 2fa selection screen

Epic Games offers two types of 2FA. Either through the use of a mobile or through an email address.

Enable Authentication App

authenticator app selection

This is possession factor authentication.

When you click on “Enable Authentication App”

You will presented with another screen asking you to download the authenticator app.

There are 3 common authentication apps that can be used with Fortnite. They are:

Google Authenticator

LastPass Authenticator

Microsoft Authenticator

It doesn’t matter which one you use they all work the same way. Download one onto a mobile device. Either scan the QR code shown in the epic games account or manually enter the entry key shown. This will tie your account with that device. From now on when you log into your Fortnite account you will prompted on your mobile device to enter a security code.

Enable Email Authentication

Email 2fa

When you click on the Enable Email Authentication button a screen will pop up which will ask you to enter a security code. That code should have already been emailed to the email account associated with the Epic Games account. The security code in the email will have to be entered into the field provided showing on the pop up screen.

Once this has been completed you will be prompted to enter a security code every time you log into Fortnite. This code will be emailed to you. While this will be a little bit of inconvenience. It will save the heart ache of losing your account, all your Vbucks and skins.

Are you getting lag in Fortnite? You might not be connecting to your local server.

High ping or latency is only one of the many possible issues when Fortnite starts feeling laggy, although it is probably the most common. What is lag? It can be caused by a few things but the most common cause is connection distance/time between a players PC and the server the game is running on. The data being sent between the PC and server is being delyaed by a slow connection so both machines are often waiting for the next piece of information to arrive before being able to make decisions on that data. This ends up feeling like the game is reacting slowly to the players input.

Another possibility is that servers themselves are under load which can manifest as lag but more often than not you will notice this as in-game stuttering or as gamers have termed it rubber banding. In a third person shooter or Battle Royale like Fortnite, if an opponent is rubber banding the player’s character will make random jerky movements and can make them harder to hit. Often if someone else’s character is rubber banding then your own character will appear to be doing the same to them. It’s not a great experience for either party.

Another thing we need to take into consideration when discussing Fortnite servers is that Fortnite has inbuilt lag compensation. What is lag compensation? It is an inbuilt prediction formula that will let Fortnite guess where a player is at the time that another player takes a shot at them. What lag compensation isn’t is the throttling of fast connections to make everyone play on a similar ping. This is a myth that still prevails amongst some Fortnite players. Fortnite’s netcode and lag compensation is state of the art, while it will give the shooter priority and on occasion players will take damage or even dying behind cover. However, it is very rare especially when compared to other BR games.

Where are Fortnite Servers Located?

Fortnite and in fact most Epic games use AWS (Amazon Web Services) as the infrastructure to run games on. This cloud based service by Amazon is easily the biggest and most widely used cloud infrastructure at the time of publishing of this article. Although Google’s Cloud Computing Services is gaining ground on Amazon. What does this mean to the average player of Fortnite? It means that when connecting to Fortnite, there are a number of hops that every connections must take. Amazon’s world wide cloud computing distribution means that there are relatively few hops before you network packet finds its way to the entrance points of the Amazon cloud. Once inside the AWS infrastructure traffic flows across a very fast private fibre network. See the map below to find the closest epic games servers to you.

Fortnite Server Locations

This isn’t the end of the story for a Fortnite players network traffic. Fortnite’s matchmaking will try and select the closest server to you when you load the game. This is not foolproof, occasionally Fortnite will try and connect a player to a server that is further away or the server closest you may indeed be laggy for some reason. If this happens the game can feel very laggy and you might want to try and reset the server connection. If this has happened to you do the following.

If one or both above checks are highlighting a problem with the closest region to you then you can change the matchmaking region in the game. Do this by doing the following.

Enter game settings.

Open the game tab.

Select matchmaking Region.

Apply the changes.

Use Matchmaking Region to select a new Fortnite server

What are the Fortnite Server Regions?

Below we have listed all the known (as of publication) Fortnite server regions. Fortnite is constantly adding server capacity as the game’s player base is not reducing but holding steady and even increasing slightly in last few months.

Fortnite Server Regions

Ohio, USA

Singapore

Virginia, USA

Australia

California, USA

Canada

Oregon, USA

Frankfurt, Germany

Tokyo, Japan

Ireland

South Korea

London, UK

Osaka, Japan

Paris, France

Mumbai, India

Sao Paulo, Brazil

We will be updating this list if Epic decides to and or remove any AWS regions. We will also update if Epic move to another cloud provider.